Raytracing 3D Linear Graftals

Abstract

Many objects in nature, like trees, mountains and seashells, have a property called selfsimilarity. Sometimes this property is very pronounced, other natural phenomena exhibit this property to a lesser degree. During the past years much attention has been paid to fractals, purely selfsimilar objects. We present a formalism, based on the well-known object-instancing graph, to represent objects which are not necessarily purely selfsimilar. We show that Iterated Function Systems and some famous variants can be described elegantly in this formalism. We also present an algorithm to raytrace such objects.